


Wasted Life

by Onceyourempire



Category: Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, I actually hate myself, I'M BLAMING MAY??? yes I am, Other, just a little
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-01
Updated: 2012-09-01
Packaged: 2017-11-13 08:15:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/501376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onceyourempire/pseuds/Onceyourempire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At this point,  you don't even wear a tie to school anymore.</p><p>And you're not wearing a tie now, taped to a chair on your school's roof with a gun between your teeth and memories in your head.</p><p>"How can you look at this, what we've done, and think it's wrong?" Tyler asks, and you can think of plenty of reasons why. But it's not like you didn't help make it happen anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wasted Life

**Author's Note:**

> Oh god so May and I were watching Fight Club on Thursday and it spiraled out of control until I jokingly suggested a fight club high school au where Tyler is real but no one believes the narrator when he talks about Tyler and then it just became an actual thing and turned into this.
> 
> Hey it's not a real fandom until it has a high school au, right??????
> 
> [Half sobs half laughs hysterically as I pull a kickflip and then sail into the sun]

I'm taped to a chair on the roof of my high school, and Tyler's got the business end of a gun between my teeth. We're looking out over the sports field and when Tyler says "Three minutes" I tongue the holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun and wonder how clean it is. I'd ask, but it doesn't feel like an appropriate question given the circumstances. Also, I've learned that it's hard to speak with a gun in your mouth.

We drilled the holes in the gun to prove we could home make a silencer. If we had done it wrong, it would have blown off Tyler's hands the first time he'd fired it. It didn't. I wonder if that's a good thing.

"Two and a half. How can you look at this, what we've done, and think it's wrong?" Tyler looks at me with his wild grin, because he wants me to be in on this too. He wants me to be his partner in anarchy even when he's got a gun in my mouth and my wrists duck-taped to a school chair. I can't reply to his retorical question, because I'm thinking about Marla. Marla Singer, the girl who kick-started all of this.

But, if I'm being honest, it began in 8th grade.

\---

In 8th grade, a kid named Tyler Durden moved into the shitty house at the end of my street with his dad. Paper street was, in general, a nice looking place with nice acting people but the house and the family at the end of the street made us all look bad. Before my dad split at 6, he used to complain to my mom about what an eyesore the house at the end of the street was. Now it had an eyesore of a family to match.

Tyler's dad died seven months after they moved in. In the years that followed, Tyler told me a lot of things about the way his dad died. It was blood parasites, brain parasites, organic brain dementia, tuberculosis, melanoma, lymphoma, testicular cancer, rising bowel cancer-- one time, he even told me it was incest.

"Incest?" I looked up from whatever I had been doing. "How do you die of _incest_?"

Tyler smirked. "His brother sneezed and gave it to him. A terrible and infectous disease. He just couldn't survive."

As far as I know, Tyler's dad either killed himself or had a heart attack. I know this because I walked past his house the day his dad died.

I was walking home from school. I always walked past Tyler's house to get home and never saw either him or his dad. That day, I saw fire trucks, police cars, and an ambulence parked on the lawn next to the Durden family's beat up truck. On the steps, surrounded by the chaos he would later grow to thrive in, sat the weedy and bug-eyed figure of Tyler Durden. He looked like he had black eyes, but when I walked closer (because of a compulsion I still can't explain) it seemed to me that he just had enough insomnia for the entire state. Perhaps the dark circles added to the bug-eyed state. I don't know.

"Hi" is what I said.

"Hey" was his reply.

"You okay?"

He shrugged, then locked eyes with me. We stared at each other while officials of all kinds ran around us. I remember thinking it was an awful lot of fuss for just one house, one man. I asked Tyler about that once. He didn't answer, just responded with a different question, leading me off topic. I wonder what he didn't want me to know.

"Is it so hard to ask?" he finally said, on those stairs on that first day.

"Ask what?"

"Ask me to come over."

"I wasn't going to ask you that."

"Weren't you?"

"Fine. Do you want to come over to my house for a while?"

And just like that, Tyler's face broke into the manic grin I'd come to know very well -- the one that takes over his whole expression and makes his eyes look brighter, though that isn't physically possible. Tyler has a way of making anything possible.

"Yeah. I do."

With that he leapt off the steps and we set off, never once looking back.

In a way, that day defined our friendship. Full of noise, insomnia, sudden solidarity, and never looking back.

Never looking back until today, when I'm on the roof of my high school with the business end of a gun in my mouth and the memories of Marla and me, Tyler and me, Tyler and Marla making my mouth taste worse than the gun. Marla has always left a bad taste in my mouth. It's just a question of if the taste is bearable or makes me want to puke my whole body out all over her and everyone she's ever known.

It's always just a question with Marla.


End file.
